The French are a proud people, and about the only aspect of their society they’re as proud of as their language and croissants is their little bike race they hold every July.

With the 100th anniversary of the Tour de France kicking off Saturday, commemorative books have already been written. Exhibitions will be shown. Amateur races will be held. A night finish into Paris will be run. The only thing missing from the big celebration are fireworks.

Entering, from stage way left, from Boulder, Colo., is Team Garmin-Sharp.

Garmin-Sharp CEO Jonathan Vaughters goes further outside the box for his strategy than he does his wardrobe, which can only be described as avant-odd. His race strategies aren’t exactly out of “Cycling for Dummies,” either.

Take last year’s USA Pro Challenge. Christian Vande Velde won on the final day.

“On paper, we shouldn’t have been able to beat (Tejay) van Garderen,” Vaughters said. “But we went out and attacked the race every single day, threw some really odd tactics at everyone’s direction and knocked people off kilter a little bit. And it worked.

“In the Tour, we have to think a little along those lines.”

Garmin-Sharp remains a huge underdog on cycling’s biggest stage. The seediest gaming rooms in Paris wouldn’t post odds on it winning the Tour. It’s Briton Chris Froome’s race to lose, with two-time winner Alberto Contador from Spain, having come off his two-year doping ban in 2012 to win the Vuelta de España.

But Garmin-Sharp, like a bottle rocket under a bike seat, can make some noise. It has three general classification (lead) riders: Ryder Hesjedal, Dan Martin and Andrew Talansky; an accomplished sprinter (Tyler Farrar); and a potential King of the Mountain winner (Boulder’s Tom Danielson).

By-the-book biking tactics state you send riders off the front to break up the peloton and make teams chase and tire. It’s usually the secondary riders, the pawns, who are sent out.

“Well, in the USA Pro Challenge,” Vaughters said, “the first day we sent our king and our queen and our rook and our bishop right off the front to basically force everyone to panic.”

It’s one thing to do that for a week. It’s another to do it for three weeks over 2,114.8 miles. Garmin-Sharp’s one small advantage is its trident star system. Hesjedal, Martin or Talansky could emerge as a contender, and no opponent will know whom to watch.

Hesjedal, 32, appears recovered from the illness that forced him to abandon his defense of his Giro d’Italia title last month.

“I was almost counting him out for the Tour, but he has shown resiliency,” Vaughters said. “He’s going to be good.”

Talansky, 24, took second in Paris-Nice, second to Froome in the time trial at Tour de Romandie and third in the final stage of the Criterium du Dauphine.

However, the keynote rider for Garmin-Sharp may be the 26-year-old Martin, who’s having a breakout year. He won Liege-Bastogne-Liege in Belgium and the queen (hardest) stage of the Volta Catalunya in Spain, and he nearly podiumed at La Fleche Wallonne in Belgium.

On this team, Martin gets props for merely staying on his bike in last year’s Tour de France, also known as the Tour de Fractures. Crashes cut Garmin-Sharp’s roster from nine to six. Martin was the only one to make it to Paris who didn’t look as if he spent the Tour inside a blender. Garmin-Sharp finished 20th out of 22 teams after winning the team title in 2011. Vaughters, who will announce his roster Wednesday, will bring some new faces to protect his trio.

“For everything that went right at the Giro, it went wrong at the Tour,” he said. “That happens. We’re beyond that this year.”

The race, as befits a 100th anniversary edition, will have its unique twists. It starts on the island of Corsica, where three days of racing will be held sans the traditional prologue. Tuesday’s team time trial, which Garmin-Sharp won two years ago, will be contested on 15 flat miles around Nice.

The toughest days will lead to Paris. The second-to-last day, July 20, when the race should be decided, will be 75 miles to the top of Annecy-Semnoz, which ends with a 6.4-mile stretch at an 8.5 percent grade. Then comes the final procession to Paris, which will begin at 5:45 p.m. in Versailles and end at 9:30, right when the lights begin to sparkle on the Champs-Elysees and the Arc de Triomphe.

“It’ll be very cool,” Vaughters said. “Hopefully, it’ll be well lit so everyone knows where they’re going.”

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